Alkimos Swell Statistics, Junho: Surf with Light or Offshore Winds

The rose diagram shows only the swells directed at Alkimos that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical June. It is based on 2306 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and largest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell was forecast.

The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the longest spokes, was WSW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the NE. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 57% of the time, equivalent to 17 days. Open water swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) only occur 2.0% of the time in a typical June, equivalent to just one day but 21% of the time we expect swell in the range 2-3m (6.5-10ft) 21%, equivalent to (6 days). Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with predicted offshore winds, and given the fact that Alkimos is exposed to open water swells, we estimate that clean surf can be found at Alkimos about 57% of the time and that surf is blown out by onshore wind 41% of the time. This is means that we expect 29 days with waves in a typical June, of which 17 days should be clean enough to surf.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.